My Contribution:
ROLE: Gameplay Programmer
TEAM SIZE: 14
DURATION: 8 Weeks
ENGINE: Unity
FOCUS: Movement, Collision and UI
Duck Duck Die is a obstacle game where you play as a mama duck trying to rescue all of your ducklings while fleeing the monster fish.
My Contributions
During the project I worked on different systems, but mostly on:
- Player movement and physics materials
- In-game UI
- Collisions and colliders
Since this was my first full game project outside of just playing around with engines in my free time, I tried to work with MVP in mind.
At the start of the project I mainly focused on player movement so the level designers could start building and testing ideas as early as possible. After that I moved on to setting up basic placeholder collisions so there was testable game play.
Later in the project I went back and improved the collision setup, replacing many mesh colliders with simpler colliders that better matched the models and were more efficient.
UI and Particle Effects
I also got the task of implementing particles and some in-game UI effects.
The particles themselves were quite simple since Unity’s particle system is very user friendly, but we wanted particles to appear in the game play UI when the player got points or picked up ducklings.
This was a bit harder since I didn’t know how to render particles only in the UI. I ended up solving it by creating a second camera that only renders particles, which is then shown through the UI camera.
Collisions and Bug Fixing
Once the core game play systems were in place, I took over more responsibility for collisions and collider setup to make sure game play interactions worked correctly.
Towards the end of the project I also spent a lot of time finding and fixing bugs.
Working in a Team
Throughout the project we worked together on many different systems. Sometimes I would implement the base version of a system, and later someone else would take over or improve it. Other times I continued on systems that someone else had started.